Musings about grad school and personal fulfillment.

Tag: grad life

As a Ph.D. student, one of the questions I hear most is: academia or industry? Every time I meet someone new and they realize that I’m close to graduating, that’s the question I hear. Every time I meet an old friend at a conference, that’s the question I hear. Even when I meet people in […]

Applying for graduate fellowships is a great use of your time as a computer science Ph.D. student, even if you do not have a strict financial need. Here are a few reasons why. Note that this post is the second of a two-part guide on graduate fellowships for computer science Ph.D. students. In a previous […]

As a Ph.D. student, your job is multi-faceted. At any given time, your time is divided between: classroom study, Research [1], writing, “networking”, teaching, applying for fellowships, curating your online identity / promoting your online presence, reviewing papers, serving on committees, and wondering why you can’t do any Research. There are probably a few other […]

One of my papers was recently recognized as an honorable mention for the NSA’s Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper Award. As an honorable mention author, I was given the opportunity to present my work to an audience of NSA security researchers. In a previous post, I briefly described the award and my paper that got the […]

Hi, younger me. You don’t know this yet, but the path you’ve chosen is one of brutal, unrelenting rejection. You’ve coasted through everything you’ve done in life so far. But you’ve met your match in academia. Everyone here is just as smart, if not smarter. They’re just as hard working, if not more so. Hence […]

I just returned from the NSA, where I gave an invited talk and received an honorable mention for their annual Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper competition. If I had to summarize: it was a humbling and educational experience. I’m happy to have participated, and am smarter for it. I thought I’d recap my experience for those […]